Eileen John reviews Anton Leist and Peter Singer (eds.), J. M. Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical Perspectives on Literature, over at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

Some of these essays explicitly set aside the literary context in which Coetzee typically works, and might be charged with avoiding complexities raised by that context, and many readers will not be so interested in establishing the ethical views of Coetzee the person. But to the extent that Coetzee or his works have been criticized for being ethically “hands-off” or evasive, I found these essays to be useful. I take one of the achievements of the novels to be that they carry a sturdy ethical burden — e.g., in van Heerden's terms, the need for kindness and respect for human and other animals, and for states and laws that support “the emergence of good people” (60) — in the midst of disorienting probing of what ethical demands rest on and of what it takes to be moved by those demands. Assuming the ethically sturdy impact is there, I would have liked to see someone engage more directly with how the novels pull that off while also having a philosophically disorienting or de-stabilizing impact.

One route into the disorienting and probing impact, and into the significance of the literary mode, is via the claims made by one of Coetzee's prominent characters, Elizabeth Costello, who is herself a novelist by profession. She speaks for the ethical centrality of opening our hearts and using sympathetic imagination to think our way into the being of another. Costello casts this sympathetic openness as allied, plausibly enough, with poetry and the imaginative work of fiction, rather than with the discursive reasoning of philosophy. Contributors to the volume take these claims in many directions, illustrating Coetzee's intense and complex questioning of sympathy, reason, and ethical life. Crary finds in Coetzee's work an exploration of a wider conception of rationality, in which emotional sensitivity is needed to reach a “just and accurate grasp” of our lives, and which can include literary speech in an “inventory of rational discursive forms” (265). Woessner finds rather an inventory of protagonists exposing the inability of rationality “to help us live our lives,” the cumulative result being a “post- or even pre-philosophical ethics of compassion,” critiquing reason “for the sake of moral life” (225-6, 223). Meanwhile, Geiger argues that in Coetzee's work the power of sympathetic imagination emerges as ethically equivocal: “we are as likely to be inhabited by good as by evil” (162). He also does not think Coetzee allows a clear distinction between poetic and philosophical language to be drawn — “For what alternative is there to the language of comparison and the abstraction of universals?”

An excerpt from the book can be found here.

If the picture grips you, it may be because on some level you have a yearning for this chill. Although a substitute hike is not quite what the composition provides – for it offers no point at which to enter the path that rises up leftwards – you might walk the mountains with much of this agenda at heart: to be sent endlessly out of yourself, endlessly upwards, to jettison the homely and the social and submit to the cold vastness of space, as if with nothing human to fall back on. The picture’s remit, therefore, is not so much topographical as poetic. You register that it has been conceived in strong emotion – in a longing, in fact, to transcend emotion – and in that light, the most quoted of all Friedrich’s remarks on his art may start to make sense. “Close your physical eye, so that you may see your picture first with the spiritual eye. Then bring what you saw in the dark to the light, so that it may have an effect on others, shining inwards from outside.” To which the artist added: “A picture must not be invented, it must be felt”.

more from Julian Bell at the TLS here.

I am standing looking at the quantum computer, trying and failing to muster an appropriate sense of reverence. It is a lovely contraption: a stack of copper tiers lined with delicate electrodes and elaborate networks of plastic tubing. It is an impressive contraption: an example, I have been told, of some of the most advanced technology in the field. My lab guide proudly points out each of the computer’s components in turn – the refrigeration system humming with liquid nitrogen, a fastidiously positioned series of lasers, one tiny sapphire processing chip – and watches carefully for my reaction. I am trying and failing to be enthusiastic. I can only smile politely, swallow the nagging swells of a yawn, and do my best not to look bored. Someday quantum computers will, their cheerleaders swear, sift through unprecedented volumes of information and solve processing problems once thought intractable. The military hopes to use them for extra-secure encryption, biologists hope to use them to unpack the mysteries of proteins, investment banks hope to use them to analyze minute market fluctuations, and everyone hopes to use them to store giant caches of data. But quantum computing is still a young field, and quantum computers can’t do any of it yet. At present, the one in front of me can factor the number fifteen.

more from Miranda Trimmier at The New Inquiry here.

If you studied the liberal arts in an American college anytime after 1980, you were likely exposed to what is universally called Theory. Perhaps you still possess some recognizable talismans: that copy of The Foucault Reader, with the master’s bald head and piercing eyes emblematic of pure intellection; A Thousand Plateaus with its Escher-lite line-drawing promising the thrills of disorientation; the stark, sickly-gray spine of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics; a stack of little Semiotext(e) volumes bought over time from the now-defunct video rental place. Maybe they still carry a faint whiff of rebellion or awakening, or (at least) late-adolescent disaffection. Maybe they evoke shame (for having lost touch with them, or having never really read them); maybe they evoke disdain (for their preciousness, or their inability to solve tedious adult dilemmas); maybe they’re mute. But chances are that, of those studies, they are what remain. And you can walk into the homes of friends and experience the recognition, wanly amusing or embarrassing, of finding the very same books.

more from Nicholas Dames at n+1 here.

Cascando

1
why not merely the despaired of
occasion of
wordshed

is it not better abort than be barren

the hours after you are gone are so leaden
they will always start dragging too soon
the grapples clawing blindly the bed of want
bringing up the bones the old loves
sockets filled once with eyes like yours
all always is it better too soon than never
the black want splashing their faces
saying again nine days never floated the loved
nor nine months
nor nine lives

2
saying again
if you do not teach me I shall not learn
saying again there is a last
even of last times
last times of begging
last times of loving
of knowing not knowing pretending
a last even of last times of saying
if you do not love me I shall not be loved
if I do not love you I shall not love
the churn of stale words in the heart again
love love love thud of the old plunger
pestling the unalterable
whey of words
terrified again
of not loving
of loving and not you
of being loved and not by you
of knowing not knowing pretending
pretending
I and all the others that will love you
if they love you

3
unless they love you

by Samuel Beckett
from Collected Poems in English and French
Grove Press, Inc. N.Y. 1977

From New Statesman:

Samuel Beckett’s poems may well constitute the least-known part of his literary output. Nearly 23 years after his death, Beckett’s plays continue to be performed around the world and there is no reason to suppose they will drop from the repertoire. His novels retain a strong, if cultish, following and are currently being reissued in corrected editions. The later, very short prose texts – dry, spare, unaccommodating fictions, or meditations on the futility of fiction – hold on, too, to their sui generis status, impossible to ignore. The poems, however, have pretty much fallen from view.

…The earlier the poems, the greater the need for notes. “Whoroscope” is characteristic of Beckett’s apprentice manner, combining heavily worn book learning with a strident, in-your-face brand of modernism. The present editors don’t supply answers to all its puzzles. The poem starts:

What’s that?
An egg?
By the brothers Boot it stinks fresh.
Give it to Gillot –

and immediately we ask: who are the brothers Boot? Who is Gillot? The notes don’t tell us, even though they guide us through what is known of Beckett’s reading of Descartes, who is revealed to be the speaker of the poem and whose taste for half-hatched eggs is the donnée of the opening outburst. The sheer oddity of this and the strenuously maintained obscurity of what follows are possibly the main point. How Beckett arrived at such a style is worth considering. The misbehaving, satirical Pound of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and Homage to Sextus Propertius may have set an example, and yet the general tone of “Whoroscope” and of Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates (1935), Beckett’s first published collection, far exceeds anything hitherto achieved by the older poet in terms of ostentatious rebarbativeness. Joyce, whose Work in Progress – later to become Finnegans Wake – would have been a recent discovery for Beckett, is another arguable father figure; but Joyce, even at his most enigmatic, wishes to charm the reader, while there is no hint of charm in the disdainful, jarring, swottier-than-thou rhetoric of Echo’s Bones.

More here.

From Nature:

Mitochondrial defects affect an estimated 1 in 4,000 children, and can cause rare and often fatal diseases such as carnitine deficiency, which prevents the body from using fats for energy. They are also implicated in a wide range of more common diseases affecting children and adults, such as multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease. Mitochondria have their own DNA and are inherited only from the mother, so replacing defective mitochondria in eggs from mothers who have a high risk of passing on such diseases could spare the children. Three years ago, a team led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov, a reproductive biologist at Oregon Health and Science University in Beaverton, created¹ eggs with donor mitochondria that developed into healthy rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta). Today, the same team reports² the creation of human embryos in which all of the mitochondria come from a donor. The method needs to be tweaked to increase efficiency and gain regulatory clearance, but it is ready for the clinic, says Mitalipov. “You can expect the first healthy child to be born [using this method] within three years.”

Just as they did with the monkeys, Mitalipov and his colleagues removed the nucleus from an unfertilized egg, leaving behind all of that cell’s mitochondria, and injected it into another unfertilized egg that had had its nucleus removed. They then fertilized the egg in vitro. In the previous experiment, the team proved in convincing fashion that the fertilized monkey eggs were good — by implanting them in uteri, where they produced four healthy offspring. To evaluate the results with human cells, the researchers had to settle for developing the embryos to the blastocyst stage — a ball of about 100 cells. They used cells from the blastocysts to produce embryonic cell lines, and then carrying out various tests on them. The cells looked like those from normal embryos, but with mitochondria exclusively from the donor.

More here.

Barbara Adams in the Ithaca Times:

A former editor of The Paris Review and The Forward, Gourevitch has been a staff writer for The New Yorkersince 1997, writing essays and blogging on domestic and international politics, most recently on the Occupy movement and Syria. His 1998 book, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the George K. Polk Award for Foreign Reporting.

Gourevitch’s most recent book (2008), Standard Operating Procedure (in paperback titled The Ballad of Abu Ghraib) was a collaboration with documentary filmmaker Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line and Academy Award-winning The Fog of War).

Ithaca Times: How did your most recent book come about? And how did you work with the material?

Philip Gourvetitch: I’d known Errol for years and we’d occasionally discussed collaborating. In 2006, he started interviewing some of the soldiers [formerly stationed at Abu Ghraib] who either took photos [of soldiers and prisoners] or appeared in them. He sent me some interview transcripts first, and I was completely engrossed; these were the kind of voices from people deeply inside this thing, people we hadn’t heard from before. I was drawn by their voices – familiar, intimate American vernacular speech, with all the mindsets it carries.

Not long after that, Errol showed me some of his footage. “How are you going to fit all of this into a movie? I asked. “These are unbelievable stories.” So we decided he’d make his movie [Standard Operating Procedure] and I’d write a book – two takes on the same core material.

More here.

Scientists have mapped a tiny roundworm's entire nervous system. Did it teach them anything about its behavior?

Ferris Jabr in Scientific American:

In the 1970s biologist Sydney Brenner and his colleagues began preserving tiny hermaphroditic roundworms known asCaenorhabditis elegans in agar and osmium fixative, slicing up their bodies like pepperoni and photographing their cells through a powerful electron microscope. The goal was to create a wiring diagram—a map of all 302 neurons in the C. elegans nervous system as well as all the 7,000 connections, or synapses, between those neurons. In 1986 the scientists published a near complete draft of the diagram. More than 20 years later, Dmitri Chklovskii of Janelia Farm Research Campus and his collaborators published an even more comprehensive version. Today, scientists call such diagrams “connectomes.”

So far, C. elegans is the only organism that boasts a complete connectome. Researchers are also working on connectomes for the fruit fly nervous system and the mouse brain. In recent years some neuroscientists have proposed creating a connectome for the entire human brain—or at least big chunks of it. Perhaps the most famous proponent of connectomics is Sebastian Seung of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose impressive credentials, TED talk, popular book, charisma and distinctive fashion sense (he is known to wear gold sneakers) have made him a veritable neuroscience rock star.

Other neuroscientists think that connectomics at such a large scale—the human brain contains around 86 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses—is not the best use of limited resources. It would take far too long to produce such a massive map, they argue, and, even if we had one, we would not really know how to interpret it. To bolster their argument, some critics point out that the C. elegans connectome has not provided many insights into the worm's behavior.

More here.

Of Politics & Art
……. —for Allen

Here, on the farthest point of the peninsula
The winter storm
Off the Atlantic shook the schoolhouse.
Mrs. Whitimore, dying
Of tuberculosis, said it would be after dark
Before the snowplow and bus would reach us.

She read to us from Melville.

How in an almost calamitous moment
Of sea hunting
Some men in an open boat suddenly found themselves
At the still and protected center
Of a great herd of whales
Where all the females floated on their sides
While their young nursed there. The cold frightened whalers
just stared into what they allowed
Was the ecstatic lapidary pond of a nursing cow's
One visible eyeball.
And they were at peace with themselves.

Today I listened to a woman say
That Melville might
Be taught in the next decade. Another woman asked, “And why not?”
The first responded, “Because there are
No women in his one novel.”

And Mrs. Whitimore was now reading from the Psalms.
Coughing into her handkerchief. Snow above the windows.
There was a blue light on her face, breasts, and arms.
Sometimes a whole civilization can be dying
Peacefully in one young woman, in a small heated room
With thirty children
Rapt, confident and listening to the pure
God-rendering voice of a storm.
.

by Norman Dubie
from The Mercy Seat: Collected & New Poems 1967-2001
Copper Canyon Press

After 40 years of planning, fundraising, and construction, architect Louis Kahn’s last great commission, Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park, is finally accessible to visitors of New York’s Roosevelt Island. The park, which officially opens this week, is dedicated to Roosevelt’s 1941 inaugural speech on the four universal freedoms—of speech and worship, from fear and want. It would be easy to take the opportunity to bemoan a 40-year lag for the project to be completed, like so many important works in New York City. But the truth is that the timing doesn’t matter. It proves that Kahn’s work can stand on its own, outside of time, eternal and significant. It’s difficult to imagine an architect in our time designing such a simple and reverent piece of architecture. Born Itzel-Leib Schmuilowsky into a Jewish family in Kingisepp, Saaremaa, Estonia, on Feb. 20, 1904, Kahn later emigrated to Philadelphia with his parents at the age of 2. After he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, his early professional career involved collaborations with several architects, including George Howe for the Philadelphia Housing Authority.

more from Michael Tower at Tablet here.

What distinguishes us from animals? Why did I scoop up a squashed hedgehog from the road this morning, on my dawn bike ride to the beach? The line between human and animal has never been clear, least of all in the medieval bestiaries that inspired Caspar Henderson’s magnificent new compendium. In those, men might have faces in their chests, or the heads of stags; virgins might be courted by unicorns; aristocrats claimed descent from bears. But Darwin didn’t make things any better. He not only proposed that we were once apes, but also that the whole of creation was and always will be in flux. Yet even Darwin was confounded by a peacock. What place was there in his system for such useless beauty? On his own journey into the vexed territory that represents the meeting of human and natural history, Henderson takes us into some dark places; his chapters, each devoted to a different and ever more unlikely species – from thorny devils to zebra fish, from flatworms to honey badgers – have the air of modern parables. In his section on Japanese macaques, for instance, he describes a series of 1960s experiments in which young monkeys were separated from their mothers and given cloth simulacra instead, only to find that their new ‘mothers’ were equipped with compressed air jets, violently rocking arms, or even brass spikes.

more from Philip Hoare at Literary Review here.

When Lincoln finished with a remark, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, “He looks up at you with a great satisfaction, and shows all his white teeth, and laughs.” Lincoln had an ear for entertaining, collecting anecdotes like the drunken hog-stealing tale and keeping them at the ready to make a point. “I remember a good story when I hear it,” he said, “but I never invented anything original. I am only a retail dealer.” We should perhaps take the comment as something of a dissemblance. It is difficult to imagine who else could have originated this snide remark in a letter to Gen. George B. McClellan, his eventual opponent in the 1864 election, when the general failed to advance against the Confederacy with the speed Lincoln would have liked: “If you don’t want to use the army, I should like to borrow it for a while.”

more from Michael Phillips-Anderson at Lapham’s Review here.

From The Daily Beast:

I became acquainted with Norman Mailer in the last 10 or 15 years of his life, at a time when he was, shall we say, mellower than he’d been. By this time he’d been married six times and was at this point married to Norris Church—as you all know Norris was one of the most beautiful women … And her physical beauty was matched by an inner, spiritual beauty—she was really quite extraordinary. I knew them, if not well, as a couple. The first time I’d met Norman was at an event at Lincoln Center—I think it was a fundraiser for a literacy organization. Norman was the MC. And I was one of a number of writers who were giving readings. When I came out on stage, Norman was gracious and shook my hand and introduced me by saying, “Joyce Carol Oates has written this remarkable book On Boxing.” He let that sink in to the audience, then added, “It’s so good I’d almost thought that I had written it myself.” And there were waves of good-natured laughter from the audience and Norman seemed just slightly puzzled, like—Why is that funny? Norman had meant his remark as the highest praise. In speaking of Norman Mailer we’re speaking of the male ego raised to the very highest, without which we wouldn’t have civilization, I’m sure.

I have a second Norman Mailer story which made an enormous impression on me when I was a younger writer. Mailer had had an extraordinary success, as you all know, with his first novel The Naked and the Dead, which was published in 1948. Like his distinguished predecessor Lord Byron, he woke up and discovered that he was famous … When you achieve such fame at a young age, your life is irrevocably changed. So it was. Norman became famous at 26—but he didn’t understand that fame brings with it infamy—in his case, The Naked and the Dead was considered pornography in some quarters. It rose to the top of bestseller lists in the United States and in the U.K. and remained there for 62 weeks. Then Norman said—(I’m not sure if I am quoting him accurately—Norman had a way of speaking about himself in the third person, which women don’t do; you know there’s something strange when you hear someone speaking of himself as he—so I probably can’t precisely mimic this)—but Norman said of the experience, “Part of Mailer thought he was the greatest writer since Tolstoy, but another part of him thought that he was an imposter—he didn’t know how to write at all.”

More here.

From Smithsonian:

Beautiful people are indeed happier, a new study says, but not always for the same reasons. For handsome men, the extra kicks are more likely to come from economic benefits, like increased wages, while women are more apt to find joy just looking in the mirror. “Women feel that beauty is inherently important,” says Daniel Hamermesh, a University of Texas at Austin labor economist and the study’s lead author. “They just feel bad if they’re ugly.”

Hamermesh is the acknowledged father of pulchronomics, or the economic study of beauty. It can be a perilous undertaking. He once enraged an audience of young Mormon women, many of whom aspired to stay home with future children, by explaining that homemakers tend to be homelier than their working-girl peers. (Since beautiful women tend to be paid more, they have more incentive to stay in the work force, he says.) “I see no reason to mince words,” says the 69-year-old, who rates himself a solid 3 on the 1-to-5 looks scale that he most often uses in his research. The pursuit of good looks drives several mammoth industries—in 2010, Americans spent $845 million on face-lifts alone—but few economists focused on beauty’s financial power until the mid-1990s, when Hamermesh and his colleague, Jeff Biddle of Michigan State University, became the first scholars to track the effect of appearance on earnings potential for a large sample of adults. Like many other desirable commodities, “beauty is scarce,” Hamermesh says, “and that scarcity commands a price.”

More here.

Gideon Levy in Haaretz:

Most of the Jewish public in Israel supports the establishment of an apartheid regime in Israel if it formally annexes the West Bank.

A majority also explicitly favors discrimination against the state's Arab citizens, a survey shows.

The survey, conducted by Dialog on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, exposes anti-Arab, ultra-nationalist views espoused by a majority of Israeli Jews. The survey was commissioned by the Yisraela Goldblum Fund and is based on a sample of 503 interviewees.

The questions were written by a group of academia-based peace and civil rights activists. Dialog is headed by Tel Aviv University Prof. Camil Fuchs.

The majority of the Jewish public, 59 percent, wants preference for Jews over Arabs in admission to jobs in government ministries. Almost half the Jews, 49 percent, want the state to treat Jewish citizens better than Arab ones; 42 percent don't want to live in the same building with Arabs and 42 percent don't want their children in the same class with Arab children.

A third of the Jewish public wants a law barring Israeli Arabs from voting for the Knesset and a large majority of 69 percent objects to giving 2.5 million Palestinians the right to vote if Israel annexes the West Bank.

More here.

A Passionate Shepherd to his Love

In 1453, when the Ottoman Empire captured Constantinople, Sultan Mehmed II ordered some changes to the city’s eastern Orthodox cathedral, the Hagia Sophia: the altar was swapped out for a minbar, the platform from which the imam addresses the congregation; and four slender minarets were added, among other things. For nearly 500 years the Hagia Sophia was a mosque, becoming, in 1931, a secular museum that enchantingly reveals layers of religious history, art, and architecture. Today the purple porphyry marble from Egypt glows richly; the Byzantine golden dome displays Islamic geometric adornments; and mosaics of the Virgin Mary sparkle up high. To better show off its wonders, the museum’s upper gallery hosts a permanent exhibition of images by Turkish architectural photographer Ahmet Ertug. In these carefully lit photos, the tiny tiles of the Virgin’s face and robes can be easily discerned. A museum within the museum.

more from Jennifer Acker at The Common here.

Much of today’s contemporary poets focus on the minutiae of mundane life, which still acts as a needed corrective to the often highfalutin conceptual, or melodramatic poetry of yore. However, as often happens when a culture reacts to an overbearing style, it attempts to negate it completely. Consequently, we go overboard in our zealousness so that we dismiss even the more redemptive parts of a previous style. Think of Walt Whitman; if someone attempted to write his poetry today, even anything close to his confident, prophetic, spiritual and nature obsessed poetry we would think of them as naive, childish, arrogant and perhaps, slightly insane. I miss this though. I want a poet unafraid to shed their cynicism, to let go of our collective fear appearing stupid, or incorrect, to explore realms that we cannot see, or feel, or quantify besides our obsession with love and self-awareness. Merwin’s translations and choices speak to a poet acutely attuned to these less prominent voices in today’s culture. A poet who collects the desiccated bones of discarded themes and forms and reinvigorates them for the contemporary mind.

more from Joe Winkler at The Rumpus here.